Today’s scratch-your-head scripture: Revelation 13:15, which declares that the second beast will have, “power to give life unto the image of the beast” to both speak AND cause to be killed all who refuse to worship said beast. Make an image come alive? What the heck does that mean? Maybe something a little like Juliano Pinto.

Juliano is a young Brazilian athlete who, paralyzed from the waist down by a car accident, dreamed of regaining his ability to play sports. But with no real hope.

Enter fellow Brazilian scientist Miguel Nicolelis (now at Duke University), whose research efforts sound an awful lot like stuff you would see on the Syfi Channel. Like stuff you may have seen in many of the seemingly hundreds of superhero movies that have hit the big screen in the last few years.

For those of you who haven’t seen a movie for a while, think Mr. Spock’s “Think Mind Meld”, but a mind meld that’s been seriously upgraded since 1967. Today’s superhero fantasies often involve personality/thought transfer: the essence of one being inhabiting another (or, as in the instance of the latest Avenger movie, the essence of one being inhabiting an artificial one.) And like much of Star Trek, what was then fantasy has become reality.

Current science calls it brain-to-brain interface, and the research, predictably, started in rats. Scientists trained one lab rate to consistently select one of two choices of stimuli when both were presented (for example, to access a piece of cheese behind a certain colored door). Then, using specially developed sensors, they recorded the brain activity of the rat while he made the choice he was trained to make, and transmitted the brain activity recorded into the brain of another rat (in a different lab). They struck lab-geek gold. The second rat repeated the actions of the first one. Because the first rat’s brain activity transferred into the second rat’s brain, dictated his actions.

The experiment proved, according to the researchers, that the “brain-to-brain interface (BTBI) enabled a real-time transfer of behaviorally meaningful sensorimotor information between the brains of two rats”. Furthermore, the researchers declared, the technology permits them to now “read hundreds and thousands of these brain cells simultaneously, and extract from these electrical signals the motor planning that the brain is generating”. Then they can; convert these signals into digital commands that, when conveyed by an electronic device into a second subject’s brain, that second subject “will obey that brain command.”

The next sentence is rather chilling. The brain receiving that sensorimotor information, according to the researchers, will obey that command “no matter where -- next to the subject, next door, or across the planet.” And the ability to send messages back to the original brain, to let them know that the actions desired have been enacted, is also possible.

It is also possible, they added, to build in the ability to send messages back to the original brain to let them know that the motor actions desired had been, in fact enacted.

The goal of the research obviously, is not programmable rats. The Holy Grail of this research is human telepathy. A refinement of the internet and cell phones that cuts out the devices completely. In that pursuit, results similar to the rat’s experiments were similar to the results that were then achieved in monkeys. One group of monkeys was rewarded with orange juice when they touched a specific object that had a very specific feel when touched. Then the brain activity of the first monkeys was recorded and transmitted into the brains of other monkeys in another location. They immediately went for the orange-juice payoff as well.

Miguel Nicolelis admits that when he first proposed brain to machine interfaces in the year 2000, other scientists told them they needed to go get their own brains checked. So they dropped it. But as they became aware of the fact that other scientists were doing basic research that confirmed the possibilities, they retrieved their old paper out of their files and started to think again.

Not from a Sci-fi standpoint, to their credit, but a medical one. They envisioned a way to apply the fledgling technology to spinal cord injuries, like the one Juliano had suffered in a car accident. His injury severed the ability of the neurological impulses that his brain sent his legs to actually reach his legs —but neither his brain nor the legs in his muscles were actually injured. So they built Juliano a robotic vest that recorded his brain activity when Juliano thought about moving his legs, and then sent that activity to a robotic exoskeleton that they built for him.

And at the 2014 World Cup finals in Rio de Janero (in front of hundreds of thousands of people) Juliano’s brain, through the wonders of modern medicine, allowed Juliano to perform the first kick. Sort of the grand opening of brain-to-brain interface (in this instance from Juliano’s brain to the computer’s brain in his exoskeleton) on the world stage.

Actual, completehuman brain-to-brain interface , commands.

What could go wrong?

Sin. Note that so far, all the “thought transfer” experiments have actually been “thought control”. And now the military is getting involved: the Department of defense approved $70 million for research aiming to decrease the sky-high rate of suicide in today’s military forces. By creating a brain implant that could regulate servicemen’s thoughts and emotions.

Welcome to Brave New World.

The journey from thought control to a ruthless totalitarian bloodbath, in both fiction and all of human history, is just a hop, skip and a jump And the exoskeleton that allowed Julianoof the ultimate totalitarian bloodbath still to come. The Antichrist. All of the above, and more, rolled into one.

The opening act of that horror on the horizonis actually described for us in Revelation 13:

They worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the beast; and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?”… 11 Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. 12 And he exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence, and causes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. 13 He performs great signs, so that he even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men. 14 And he deceives those[e] who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived. 15 He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. Revelation 13:4, 11-15

Could it be that someday, a trusty sidekick of the antichrist will construct a cyborg and bring it to life by enabling its control by brain- to cyborg brain- transfer?

Maybe. Maybe not.

What we do know is that the apostle John wrote this about 100 AD, in a world in which the concept of a man making an image (the Greek word meaning, fundamentally, a copy) of a world leader like the antichrist and then making it come to life must have seemed fantastic indeed.

Almost 2000 years later? The brain –to brain interface technology (human brain to an electronic brain, in this case) could easily be brought about.

One of the researchers did point out that the research had risks, for example, if some megalomaniac with ambitions for world dominance got hold of it and used it for mind control.Then he finished with; “But that’s true of all futuristic trans-human endeavors.“

What is it Paul said?

"Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light. 15 It is not surprising, then, if his servants also masquerade as servants of righteousness. Their end will be what their actions deserve." II Corinthians 11:14-15